A awkward Question to single mums

[Issy777]

How would you trust meeting another man when you have kids?
This will sound a horrible, uncomfortable question but I recently was witnessed to something my best friend went through a few years back
She was a single mum to her 9 year old daughter, met a guy in a restaurant we went to (a waiter) he was way too fast with her
To leave out the gruesome details, she caught him stroking daughters leg. Was horrific
She's now scared of meeting someone again. I'm in a bad relationship n think I only stay because i have two daughters n I just wouldn't.. couldn't trust another man, not just cos of what happened with bf but because it's something Iv always feared
What if u meet a guy he acts like Prince Charming, u become close so you're ready to introduce him to your child ? How can you trust his intentions? What he'd be capable off?
Just something I want to know as I know it's holding me back I know there's obvious going to be no way of knowing but for instance when and how long would u introduce your dc to new guy?

@Graphista that is very interesting and makes sense. Did you ever check to see if he had published anything about his theories?

I think those theories sound very relatable to the experience I’ve had with victims and, in some ways how social services do mitigate further abuse. Women can and have had their children removed for placing them in repeatedly dangerous or risky situations, such as having terrible choices in men or allowing unknown men access to the children, particularly if they’re female.

We would go into homes and when we left asked to define what areas of concern were, the obviously-comfortable late teens hanging around where young females were at least a red flag for possible abuse.

For me, I would like to see more research and awareness about sibling abuse. It’s hard to put into words how all encompassing it is to have someone you adore, abuse you in the worst ways.

For me, the worst of it was the casual building up of things like favourite films and music to have those things laughed at, broken and disregarded. I once had a diary and book of poetry I’d written handed around our school, I was maybe 13.

The physical abuse was terrifying of course, but much of it was insidious and I only realised it was abuse many years later.

I think sibling abuse is far more common than people think, yet it’s impossivle to get help because there is literally nobody objective, you are always going to think the best of your kids.

I remember speaking to my mum about it in adulthood and her saying ‘you never had it as bad as I did’ because that was her measure. Her brother was abusive but mine was clever, he systematically and completely destroyed any chance I had to develop a personality or tastes. He literally controlled every aspect of my life for the first 17 years of it.

I still come out with things to DH that I’ve ‘remembered’ happening, shit that I just kept down and have felt ashamed to mention because it feels silly to tell someone how awful it felt to fall in love with a CD and someone find it, laugh at it and how pathetic it was to like that music, then smash it.

My mum was powerless to defend me because she was unable to view her son as the oppressor, which I get. I love my sons. It would be very hard for me to view them as anything but delightful, kind little beings.

But what she could have done is not left me alone with them so much. I mean I was left for 3 weeks with a 16 and a 14 year old male at the age of 11.

This is after years of being left alone in the afternoon with them. They just used to torture me. It was something to do for brother. He would seek me out and he would harm me for sport. Daily.

I grew up in an absolute living hell and all these people banging on about therapy. I have complete PSTD and bipolar disorder. Funnily enough I’ve HAD quite a lot of therapy and now live a normal life with a sweet little loving family and a husband I’ve been with for 13 years. by all accounts I am FUCKING WINNING at life. I have what I was always told I would never have; love. In abundance.

If the residual damage from my childhood is that I (funnily enough) don’t allow my teenage sons to look after their sister, then I actually think that’s okay.

You know what? I think THEY will think that’s okay too. They know that people’s reactions are often a mixture of their behaviour and people’s ideas and mindsets, they HAVE to know this because having a mum with complex mental health issues is something they have to deal with too.

And you know what? It’s not ruining them as people or making them think I don’t trust them. Mostly people are more forgiving than than, other than on mumsnet of course.

"1) Biological dads are equally likely to be abusive"

Statistically not true.

2. Very few men ARE actually peadophiles

Sexual abuse is much less rare than we used to think though.

Graphista so sorry to read all tgis but knowledge is power and the better we understand the better.

CantankerousCamel so very sorry to hear of your experiences.

I think you are very brave to share your experiences and I think we can all learn things from this thread.

All best wishes,

Overall, I'm with @CantankerousCamel on this. Camel has taken a horrendous amount of abuse and bashing on this thread, largely by posters with no experience of abuse themselves in either a personal or professional capacity.
Camel has experience in both yet has been battered by people who just don't want to hear what she's saying.

Camel

There's a lot of naivety and ignorance on this thread and really it's of no wonder how so many children are allowed to be abused.

I feel horrified at those who are saying it's not about wrapping children up in cotton wool and preventing anything from happening by being risk averse, it's about teaching my child to cope and deal with anything that happens to them What the actual...!? Prevention is the only way to make sure children are mentally and physically unharmed.

Preventing abuse means removing any opportunity for an an abuser to access your child. Simple.

Unfortunately abuse happened in my family, my mother and her sisters were abused and raped repeatedly by their two older brothers.
The torment Camel describes where her brother tortured and tormented her rings bells with what my mother told me about her abuse. The parents facilitated this by leaving older teenager boys in charge of younger girls.

As a result of her experience, none of us were exposed to risk of harm by any male family members or baby sitters.
We were protected to the hilt, probably overly so, particularly by my father who was borderline obsessive about men being abusers.

My sister put her daughter to a nursery with a male staff member but refused to let him be involved in her personal care.
This was stipulated in the care plan. She was a single parent and never once let a man she was seeing meet her child. Her daughter is now 18 and has never been abused.

Everyone needs to be aware and vigilant to abuse, not just single parents but certainly they are higher risk.

For me the most relevant thing here is objectivity.

You cannot he objective about a person you love, whether it’s your son or your partner. So if you are a single parent, you need to be aware that your judgment is clouded by your personal feeling and not allow that cloud to factor into a risk assessment involving your child.

Thanks for those who stuck up for me by the way, the endless reports made me unable to post here as I was told I would be banned if I did. I am hoping now the conversation has moved on enough from people insisting I am talking about them, so I can engage as it’s very strange to have to watch a conversation about yourself and not participate. Especially when that conversation involves lots of people making out you’re unbelievably harmful to your kids or extreme or causing damage simply by mitigating risk.

So I really hope we have all moved on from that. FWIW I am happy to be m on the side of the fence that doesn’t involve my children being at risk.

Can't you see that objectivity runs both ways? You must know that you cannot be objective about the risk of familial abuse because you are a survivor yourself.

But I’ve spent years researching into areas of social policy, done training in family and young people social work.

Nothing I’ve seen suggests that being cautious about your children’s safety is a bad thing.

I am a pretty objective person. If I have an opinon I tend to research it to death.

For example I don’t put stair gates up in my house. This is because I have never ever seen a situation of a child harming themselves failing down the stairs when

Pt 2

...When they have been taught to use the stairs.

Same with my son walking to the shop (he’s 8) assessing that situation he is perfectly safe to walk to the shop, so he does.

I am not some over cautious, untrusting mother. However I have seen the causes of, victims of and perpetrators of abuse and I can see no reason to move away from the mindset I have now.

It’s very easy to leave your children with women, to have a baby sitter for your younger child while older children are around.

Etc etc.

These aren’t major issues, they are simply what you do.

No, Camel, and this is the mindset I'm talking about. It's not "simply what you do". It's what YOU, personally, do, because you come from an abuse traumatised background. You're not doing it because it's normal and correct, you're doing it because of your own anxiety. And I totally understand why you do it, and why you will always do it, but you cannot make other people take on your own anxieties and apply them to every facet of their lives.

I don’t know anyone with similar training who feels differently to me. Nor have I said ‘everyone must do what I do’ I have simply answered questioned and been repeatedly ripped apart or told I am ‘extreme’

There is nothing extreme about not leaving your vulnerable young people in care of the demographic of person who causes the most abuse.

I haven’t said anything about convincing anyone else of anything, I have been told I am extreme, that I ‘need help’ that my children will ‘be damaged’ because of my choices. All of which is nonsense.

I also don’t leave my children next to rivers and lakes, I don’t teach them to swim and hope for the best. Nor do I look out of the car window and say ‘we aren’t stopping here because LAKES ARE SO DANGEROUS’ we just find somewhere else to have a picnic.

I just find someone else to do the childcare. I just find another way to exist that doesn’t involve putting my children at risk.

Nothing has been offered to suggest why this mindset should change, just people being defensive and attacking.

OK.

Now why don’t you go away cold and explain to some rape survivors why they should wander around the same places st night where they were raped because they are being ‘extreme’ and ‘overreacting’ not to?

Marcopront iirc he had published some articles which I read at the time, unfortunately I have forgotten his name plus i think it unlikely he's still alive, I think he was in his 60's then.

"I think those theories sound very relatable to the experience I’ve had with victims" really doesn't surprise me.

Another child protection worker I spoke with once I asked why even when SS involved some families the abuse continues/abuser still given access/new abusers welcomed in. She said she thought it was because to them it was normal! That they'd been so abused themselves they genuinely couldn't see it was wrong. That's terrifying.

Unfortunately I suspect you're right CC that sibling abuse isn't necessarily less likely but is underreported and researched. I also agree with you that acknowledging ones lack of objectivity is important. From either side of the fence

BUT Colditz - I would argue being a survivor makes us better than most at spotting an abuser too sometimes. Just as abusers have honed their "profiling" skills in order to target us, we end up unwittingly honing ours to spot an abuser (if we're "lucky"). I can spot an abusive alcoholic at 20 paces even when they're sober! I've been fairly certain that certain friends/relatives friends/partners/husbands are/were abusive long before it's been disclosed/confirmed. Which is a horribly tricky position to be in! Not knowing whether to say anything, or to keep trap shut but just make sure loved one knows you're there for them. Absolute minefield.

Frankly I've found its made me a good judge of character! Only time I've got it wrong is ex - was totally blindsided by his infidelity, didn't see it coming at all.

It's not just colditz, I'm not quite as cautious as camel but as I said I was always quite cautious who i left dd with who would've been in a position to abuse her. That included no sleepovers at friends who's parents I didn't know VERY well, no male babysitters, no introducing her to anyone I dated (if they'd reached a serious relationship level I'd have done a gradual introduction/more time together from probably about 8/9 months, in my company and built it up), as well as the "usual" precautions I would HOPE everyone takes re not being alone with teachers, teaching her bodily autonomy and what to say/do if she felt unsafe etc

What would be more informative would be to know in honest detail what parents of children who did end up abused did. My own parents, even aside from the fact one of them was abusive, left us with whoever would agree to babysit! That included late teen boys, on one occasion asking one to babysit us within half an hour of THEIR meeting him! Wtf they were thinking I don't know! Also leaving me babysitting other 2 from 13 on, bro was a little younger but taller and certainly physically stronger. And yet strict in other ways (though part of that was possessiveness on dads part - eg soon as he realised I started having boyfriends he suddenly got much stricter about curfew and where I was allowed to go and who with).

Failingat40 I too am horrified at the idea of helping survivors cope after the fact rather than prevent it in the first place. I hope that's not actually what those posters meant! Because there is NO treatment that can ever make it anything other than a lifelong pain. The pain can possibly be reduced slightly but it never goes.

graph

We went into a young families home whose children had a PO. They had a 8/9 week old baby girl and had used electrical tape to tape her dummy to her face. This is knowing that social workers were visiting. When questioned, they simply said ‘well she keeps spitting it out then crying for it’

They literally had No Idea of how dangerous that was, it was just not part of their assessment to consider chocking risk, what would happen if she was sick etc.

For me it really highlighted the generational risk of abuse. What you have been taught or not taught, you pass on.

Children need us to be vilgalent, mindful and also able to allow them to take some risks. It is a minefield for parents but a key point is looking at research and listening to survivors of harm. I would not have been abused had my parents considered the risk of leaving us home correctly. My brother would probably still be abusive, but I would not have faced what I did on an endless basis for so many years.

That is the only thing that matters.

A spectrum of parent has been seen on this thread, from the sublime to the ridiculous but I am still quite happy to be placed on the ‘cautious’ side of the fence where it comes to my children and males in their lives

graphista and okpedro there is a fascinating book called "the body keeps the Score by Bessel van de Kolk, who is something of a well known psychiatrist dealing in trauma of all kinds.

It's not an easy read but some of what he says explains how trauma arises and affects us and also gives some ideas for how to handle it.

I checked the book out with some professionals and they said the stuff in it is generally seen as reliable.

The point of all this is that he says a mistreated or traumatized child grows up to think that certain behaviours are normal (eg hanging around with teens who are not safe) because that is all they've known. Also they don't perceive the warning signals that people from safer backgrounds pick up on. They have been numbed to the signs.

(fwiw I've seen at close quarters the effects of extreme abuse, 10 on the SAP scale)

cantankerous I do think there is a middle ground between never allowing males with children, and letting anything go, but I think you're doing absolutely amazingly too.

Im sorry if that comes over as patronizing, it really isnt meant to.

Sea

I have ‘Let things go’ I have a relationship with a man, I have two young sons, I have even got a tenuous relationship with one of my brothers (not the hideously abusive one)

I have forgiven my mother and, to some extent, my father.

If your idea of ‘letting things go’ is to place my children in a situation that I KNOW can be dangerous, damaging and harmful to them for no good reason, then I think that’s a pretty bloody odd thing to suggest.

I don’t need to leave my children with men, I certainly don’t need to do that just to prove a point. In actual fact there have been precisely NO situations in their lives where I have been put in a position where I’ve had to alter my arrangements or seek out something different to avoid men.

Might check out the book.

CC I too am happy to have been a perhaps "too cautious" parent rather than one who's actions resulted in an abused child.

If there's 2 ends of the scale that is the one I want to be on.

I may check out the book, but have to agree comments along the lines of "letting go" are irritating and usually come from non-survivors.,

There is no "letting go" there is coping better, there is surviving, there is even to a degree faking a normal life, there is even in some cases forgiveness. But it's never gone.

It’s the insinuation that in order to have ‘let go’ I need to put my children at risk. That’s utter nonsense.

Nobody has EVER told me to let go, but to accept that what happened has happened and move on from it. Which I have.

Trust me if you’d asked the therapist of my 15 year old self If I would be happy, settled, raising three children and managing my mental health conditions with exercise and diet, they probably would have laughed at you.

I have done FUCKING well in the circumstances.

cantankerous and graphista by "letting anything go" I meant allowing anything at all to happen, without supervision.

Not Frozen style 'let it go' crap

Camel, have you voiced your concerns about your sons and husband abusing your daughter to anyone in real life?